The Infants in the Aspen Grove
by notesofwimsey
Summary: A fifty year old case haunts Booth and the Squints: forty-four infants buried in apple crates. Booth dubbed Zach Addy "King of the Lab" months ago. Can he deliver on his promise to help solve this case? Spoilers to Season 3 finale.
1. Chapter 1

**The Infants in the Aspen Grove**

_Spoilers up to Season 3: "The Santa in the Slush"_

_A/N: At Christmas I wrote a story called "The Twelve Days of Bones". In it, the squints try to determine what happened to forty-four infants found in a field near an old mansion which had burned down in the 1970s. Zach Addy came up with a potential solution to the mystery. This is the rest of the story._

_Disclaimer: The characters and the show Bones are the intellectual property of their creators and Fox TV._

* * *

**The Ghost in the Machine**

Zack stood in front of the whirring machines, appearing to be doing nothing but stare into space. He had 17 different tests running for eight different cases, as well as seven experiments supporting various research projects for three different universities that had asked for his help. He had two reconstructions underway in one corner of the lab, and was designing a new piece of equipment for imaging that was so sophisticated even Dr. Brennan's eyes had glazed over when he tried to explain how it would work.

If asked, Zack could have explained exactly what each test was looking for, what results he predicted, and how far the experiment had run.

No one asked.

It was late and the lab was finally quiet. Other than a skeleton staff, security and cleaners, Zack was alone in the Jeffersonian. He had carved out this space of time to work on a project, in spite of the fact Dr. Saroyan had asked them all to let it go. She had said, with a sigh and seemingly genuine regret, that the resources of her team had to be better spent than to continue to chase down a potential crime that had taken place, if it happened at all, over 40 years before.

But Zack couldn't let go of the memory of those babies so easily, couldn't let the hope in Agent Booth's face die.

Booth had trusted him, Zack Addy, to solve this case.

It had been months ago, during the period between Christmas and New Year's. Zack had returned to Washington DC from Minnesota, from spending the holiday with his forty brothers and sisters and cousins and all, to find the lab in an uproar. Skeletons found in a field, wrapped in cotton towels and buried in apple crates. Agents digging carefully, slowly, under Dr. Brennan's guidance, bringing up crate after crate of tiny bones.

And Agent Booth growing colder and fiercer as each infant was discovered. Angry and frustrated when questions could not be answered. Distant and pitiless as the evidence piled up, and yet yielded nothing.

Zack woke up at night sometimes, dragging himself out of disconcerting and confusing dreams in which he was standing in the middle of the display Angela had created and hung in one of the small galleries. Dr. Saroyan had made her take it down: forty-four little, unformed faces, drawn in soft charcoal, features hazy in that way an infant was: mere potential. Angela had drawn some sleeping, others awake and staring curiously at a world they had never seen.

Every employee at the Jeffersonian went through that room at least once. No one left unmoved. Several, and not just the women, had wept unashamedly. Dr Saroyan had finally helped pack up each portrait, carefully crating them and taking them to one of the many storage places in the institute. When Jack had angrily offered to buy the entire collection, at a price far over what anyone else could afford, she had shaken her head.

They would stay there, she said, until the story was ended.

That had been three months ago. So many new cases had come in that the team was stretched thin. There was no time to keep the case active, she said at that month's staff meeting. It would have to be left until there was more time, or until there was a break in the case.

After a call from Dr. Brennan, Booth had walked into Dr. Saroyan's office with a face like thunder. Zack had never understood that expression until that day. He had waited for the screaming, for the fight that never came.

Booth had walked out again fifteen minutes later, stiff, moving as if time had caught up with him all at once. He had not returned to the Jeffersonian for nearly a week.

Zack slept little at the best of times. After Iraq, he slept less. He could not explain to anyone how the dreams made him feel. He had not dreamed as a child – not that he remembered. He had always known his state of consciousness: awake or asleep. There was no middle ground for him, no place where what was collided with what could not be.

Until Iraq.

He had never known anything like that. The heat and the fear and the sand that got in everything. The men with their simple crudity and their simpler heroism. The orders that contradicted themselves, contradicted common sense. The constant push to move faster and further in order to accomplish less and less.

He had been taught to shoot a rifle, to carry a knife. He had undergone basic training, even though there was no expectation he would ever have to defend himself. He had slept on a canvas bunk and eaten in a mess and carried MREs for days in the field. He had drilled and trained and worked to be accepted by the others on the base, the others in his team.

He had failed.

Utterly and completely.

He had been sent home before his tour was ended. Told that he could not adapt to Army life. Told he should consider why the Jeffersonian was the only place he felt at home.

He blinked at the machines, whirring busily.

He felt at home here. And at his parents' in Minnesota. And in his little apartment over Jack's garage.

He felt at home with the people he worked with: Jack with his constant pushing and teasing and reluctant sharing of the lab crown; Angela with her indulgent attempts to make him more fallible, more in tune with other people; Dr Brennan with her complete understanding of his need to make sense of the world, and her trust in his ability to do it; even Dr. Saroyan, whose presence was both thrilling and terrifying, whose scent followed him home into his bed, whose voice shivered through his skin to lie on his bones like silk.

And Agent Booth, who had patted him on the shoulder and made Jack call him the King. Who knew more about honour and duty than anyone Zack had ever met. Who defined what being a good man was.

Who had trusted Zack to solve a case.

Whom he had failed.

Utterly and completely.

He had squeezed out as much time on the machines, on the databases searching kinship DNA analysis, as he possibly could. He had buried his testing in reams of paperwork not even Dr Saroyan was likely to search through. But he knew that this was the last run possible. If he didn't come up with something substantial in the next fifteen hours, his time was up.

Zack Addy stood in front of the whirring machines, staring into space.


	2. Chapter 2: Ghost of an Injury

_Possible spoilers up to Season 3: "Pain in the Heart"_

_A/N: This was hard. After the season finale, I found it very difficult to reconcile what we learned with the character I had been writing about. It took some time to decide whether to stick with or reject canon. I am now going to say that this story is set four or five months before the events of "The Pain in the Heart"._

_But it hurts to say that._

_Disclaimer: The characters and the show Bones are the intellectual property of their creators and Fox TV. _

* * *

**Chapter 2: Ghost of an Injury**

_"There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury"_

_Alexander Smith_

* * *

"So, Zack, I hear you have something for me." Booth was rubbing his hands in anticipation as he walked into the young anthropologist's lab.

"No, I don't, Agent Booth," Zack said, looking up nervously.

Booth frowned, "Bones said you had got a hit from one of the databases in the apple crate babies case."

Zack looked in vain over Booth's shoulder, searching for help from a more understanding source. "I did find a match. Several, in fact."

"So you have something for me." Booth stated confidently.

"No, I am afraid I do not, Agent Booth."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute." Booth threw his hands up in the air. "You did get a hit?"

Zack nodded cautiously.

"But you won't tell me about it?"

"Not won't, Booth – he can't."

Zack's face lit with relief when Dr. Brennan spoke from the door. She had seen Booth come in and had run to intercept him. Unfortunately, she had not made it in time.

"Zack can't tell you about the information he found. It would break research protocol." She opened her mouth to explain further, but Booth rode right over her.

"Protocol? What kind of protocol keeps material evidence from an investigator in a federal crime? Any information you found through our databases can be shared with me. You know that, Bones. You're the one who told me Zack had found something."

"And I was wrong," Brennan said firmly. " Not that he found something – he did."

Zack was nodding and backing subtly away from Booth.

"But I was wrong about where he found it," she went on smoothly. "He did not find the information in one of the federal databases. Therefore, he cannot share the information with the FBI without a warrant."

Booth simply stared at her for a moment, his mouth open, anger beginning to stir beneath the surface.

Cam Saroyan stepped into the lab in Brennan's wake, "Seeley," she said warningly.

"Keep out of this, Camille," he retorted evenly.

"You know I can't. Protocols exist for a reason, Booth. Sort of like federal laws."

Brennan stepped in again, tag-teaming seamlessly with Cam. "The information Zack has didn't come from any of your databases, Booth," she repeated, giving him time to control his emotions. "He was doing a side project for the University of Washington …"

"And that's a problem, you see, because of the Ward case; we can't use the information from one case to inform another one, especially if there could be international implications…" Cam's voice once more over-rode Brennan's, trying to get through to Booth with a flood of information to keep him from going over the table and simply shaking the information out of a shrinking Zack, who was now sitting at the table.

Booth stopped staring at the young scientist and transferred the icy glare to the two women, whose babbling stopped for a moment.

"The Ward case?" His voice was a little too calm, a little too quiet.

"Dr. Ward from the University of British Columbia was doing a study…" Brennan began.

"On genetic causes for arthritis," Zack interjected. "There is a community in the Pacific North West which has an extremely high incidence of a rare form …" his voice tailed off when Booth's darkened gaze swung back to him

"The Nuu-chal-nuth people of Vancouver Island," Camille stepped in again. "Their blood was collected in the 1980s – Ward promised to find some way to help them. He did some studies, but mostly …"

"He used the blood samples, the DNA, to prove a theory about whether the First Nations people really are genetically linked with Asians from Siberia – whether they came over the Bering Straits or not. A classic case of bio-colonialism."

The disgust in Brennan's voice was for the duplicity in gathering the sample, Booth registered vaguely, not for the research being done.

"So how did our babies get genetically linked to Indians living in British Columbia?" he asked, following the one thread he thought he could pick up.

"They didn't," Zack stated, his eyes showing his confusion. "They have nothing to do with this study …"

Booth groaned out loud and clutched his aching head. "So you are telling me that some study which has nothing to do with our case gave you evidence that could tell me how to begin identifying 44 dead babies and their families – could give some closure to people who have been lied to for nearly 50 years, Zack – and you won't tell me what that evidence is, and you can't even tell me _why _you can't tell me?" His voice may have started off calm, but as he spoke it grew in volume and irritation, infecting the room with a kind of menace Brennan had only seen Booth use on criminals and people he was determined to break.

It worked. As Booth advanced on him, Zack put his head down on the examining table, and wrapped his arms protectively over the back of his neck.

"What the hell is going on here?" Angela was by Zack's side before anyone even realized she had come into the room, one arm over the young man's shoulders, glaring at Booth ferociously. "Why are you bullying Zack?"

"Forget it. Just forget the whole thing – babies, families, mothers who were lied to – forget everything. What's really important is that some researcher doesn't get his knickers in a twist because we used some information to help people." He stormed out of the lab, moving so fast down the corridor it took Brennan several moments to catch up to him.

"Booth! Wait! Damn it all, just wait a minute and talk to me." She grabbed his arm, but stepped back when he turned that cold flat look on her – the one that meant he was in full combat-mode.

"We can't agree on this one, Bones." His voice was chilled, cold breath reaching out to touch her cheek. "I want to solve the case. Once and for all. I want those babies to have names. I want the mothers whose children were murdered and tossed away like compost to feed trees to know the truth. I want the people in that neighbourhood who closed their eyes to what was going on there to know what kind of people they were protecting."

Brennan turned from the naked pain on his face, her gaze falling to her feet. "I know you think we are just being unnecessarily obstructionist, Booth. I know that you want to solve the case – not just to solve the case – but to put things right. But if we ignore protocol in this case, we could lose much needed help in other cases. Institutions won't trust us to work with them. Researchers will not share their information with us. It matters, Booth. It does matter."

"I may be able to agree on one level, Bones, but …" His voice faded out helplessly, and with a curiously stunted gesture, he walked out of the Jeffersonian.


End file.
